RE: How will the semantic web emerge

>Actually, I believe the usual argument for ontologies is that they are a
pre-requisite for meaningful communication between machines.

That's only one side of the coin. Ontologies are community contracts about
the representation of a part of the world. So they foster human2human,
human2machine, AND machine2machine interaction.
It is often heard that ontologies are just "machine-processable"
representations of a domain of discourse, but that is a way too narrow view,
since most ontology formalize only part of the community contract in
machine-processable, formal semantics, and capture another important share
in e.g. natural language descriptions or labels. Most ontologies that I know
do not actually *define* the meaning of its elements using ontology language
constructs, but only *restrict* the possible interpretations.
 
---------------------------
martin.hepp@deri.org, phone: +43 512 507 6465
http://www.heppnetz.de <http://www.heppnetz.de/>  / http://www.deri.org
<http://www.deri.org/>  
 


  _____  

From: semantic-web-request@w3.org [mailto:semantic-web-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Adrian Walker
Sent: Freitag, 16. Dezember 2005 22:45
To: semantic-web@w3.org
Subject: RE: How will the semantic web emerge


Hi Joshua,

At 12:54 PM 12/16/2005 -0800, you wrote:
The argument for ontologies is often that they are a pre-requisite for
meaningful communication

Actually, I believe the usual argument for ontologies is that they are a
pre-requisite for meaningful communication between machines.

Current work on the Semantic Web seems unconcerned with how machines will
explain what they are doing to (non-programmer) people , and how such people
will communicate with the machines.

There's been quite a bit of discussion recently about how to "jump start"
the semantic web. Easy communication in both directions between machines and
business and scientific end-users would seem to be necessary, if perhaps not
sufficient. 

There's more about this in the "e-Government Presentation" at the site
below.  There's also an online system at the same site that illustrates how
something like this can work in practice.

                                -- Adrian




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Reengineering
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